The Impermanence of Internet: Cyberanthropology At A Thousand-Word Glance

I want to be a cyberanthropologist. I want to study Internet subcultures and figure out why they mimic real-world constants in culture, without any conscious effort from the members of that subculture. But I'm haunted by a question: What purpose would it serve?

There's a growing branch of psychology, technological psychology. I hypothesize that it is named this because psychologists lack imagination, but I digress. There's been quite a bit of study in this field recently, especially concerning my generation. Previously, a generation was defined as 20 or so years. Now, it's being shortened to about six. People of my generation have been studied because of our unique temporal position: We were about when the Internet came to into its own, en masse, during our tertiary educational period. Developmental psychologists divide our stages of education into four periods: primary (from the time we are born until the time we enter school at ages 5 or 6; this is where most of our enculturation takes place), secondary (kindergarten to mid-middle school, where we learn the basics of social interaction), tertiary (where we learn to define ourselves as a person, and begin to cement our ideas of worldview and identity, ranging from high school to mid-bachelor's degree), and beyond (everything following, where our concepts of what a person is and what they should be become better defined, our worldview becomes more concrete, and we become less flexible). Because we happened to be in our tertiary educational period during the Internet Boom, where Internet service was finally getting to more outlying areas of the country and becoming more ubiquitous, we are in a unique position. Those that came before us still tend to learn better from a hard-copy text or manual than from a web page; those that came after us will find the information they need, retain it long enough to reproduce it on a product that they desire, then almost immediately forget it. But we few have some unique traits. We have an almost innate ability to perform data searches -- we can take search parameters and refine them almost instantaneously to get to the exact tidbit of information we need. Other generations have a slightly harder time of things, because this is, indeed, a learned skill. But we also process data differently. While the previous generation doesn't necessarily absorb information from the web in a complete sense, and the generation following us forgets it as soon as they regurgitate it, people of our generation will find, digest, interpret, absorb, and learn these sorts of information with little effort. Theories as to why this is include the fact that the previous generation does not trust current technology and thus will not learn from it "properly", and the later generation will not learn it because, to them, it is always available. But we -- members of my generation -- understand that information on the Internet is impermanent, and as such we should learn it while it is available to be learned, lest it be lost forever. We've been through many data wipes from many different information and media services since the true dawn of the Internet, and that has served to condition us; we know that, in the blink of an eye, anything and everything can be lost. (Does anyone other than me remember the Wikipedia Catastrophe of 2004, or the Youtube Conflagration of 2005?)

While interesting, this information yields a slightly different question in my mind. Despite my anti-humanitarian leanings, I do want to help people. I want to solve problems, right wrongs, make life easier for people the world over. Anthropology, at its base description, is the study of everything that humans do and everything that does to humans. It's very broad, and as a general rule encompasses everything. Cyberanthropology, then, is the study of everything humans do on the Internet and associated technologies, and everything those technologies do to humans. As the Internet and associated technologies become ever-more ubiquitous, more and more people rely on it to give them necessary information and networking that they need. I want to study the cultural aspects of this, as mentioned.

Will I be solving any problems? I can't say for certain. I know I can solve one problem for Google, who I'm hoping will bankroll me. They're trying to create demographics and search criterion for different Internet subcultures -- that is, they're trying to profile the Internet at large. And to the best of my knowledge, they don't have any anthropologists on board. A few sociologists, yes, but no anthropologists. I won't say that there isn't any chauvinism in science; I for one feel sociologists are doing it wrong. Granted, there are some things that sociology would be better suited to studying (high-profile things such as prostitution in major metropolitan areas of the United States), but sociologists aren't trained to interpret and hypothesize about their data; they err more on the side of 'make a statistic, quantize it, and move on'. Anthropology, especially on the cultural side, is set apart by the concept of the participant-observer. Anthropologists do their best to live the life while still observing the life-ways of a people, attempting to boil these patterns down and categorize them so they can be studied cross-culturally. As the number of real life cultures diminishes at an alarming rate of 20-50 cultures per year, new Internet subcultures appear at an alarming rate, with the same cultural items (thoughts, feelings, and actions) as their real-life counterparts. This is fascinating to me. It doesn't seem like it would solve much, however; I might be able to provide a new and interesting insight to Google in their search to create nothing but demographics out of the Internet to refine their searches.

But will it be anything more than that? Unless we develop some major cyberpunk technology in the next decade, likely not. I don't enjoy second-guessing myself, especially with my chosen field and professions; it will be a hard enough life as is. Am I doing something worthwhile? Perhaps only time will tell.